rm must begin very early in their lives, before yet they
enter into marriage, before yet they enter upon the days of their
courtship. Our young men need curbing. Youthful precocity must be
checked. "_Cito maturum cito putridum_" says the Latin, "soon ripe,
soon rotten." We allow our young men, some of them exceedingly young,
too many liberties. We allow them to sow too many wild oats. If their
intention is some day to take unto their care and keeping a woman's
life and happiness, to pluck from out a comfortable and contented home,
and from the embrace of devoted parents, a pure and happy and trusting
young woman, who has never felt the wrench and shock of life's storms,
nor the cold shoulder of neglect, nor the gnawing tooth of want, then
let them see to it in time that they may bring to her a heart as pure
and mind as uncorrupted, and character as unpolluted as they expect
from her.

The law of heredity, of transmission of ancestral poison, is as
operative in the male sex as in the female. A pure and healthy
offspring must be preceded by a pure and healthy parentage. A
rottening tree never produces luscious fruit. "Like begets like." An
enfeebled father means not only feebleness in the next generation, but
also perpetuated misery and vice and crime. Marriage is sacred and
necessary and obligatory, but not all marriages are so. There are some
marriages from which woman should recoil as much as she would from
death itself. Rather that death would woo her than a man--if I may be
permitted to honor him with that name--whose constitution is
undermined, whose strength is sapped, and whose marrow and blood are
poisoned. Rather an old maid than a profligate's nurse. Rather a life
of single blessedness than the housekeeper of a wreck of a husband.
Rather single and happy and stainless and conscience-free than a mother
of an unfortunate offspring, that have the sins of their father visited
upon them, and that shall one day curse their parents for having given
existence to them. Another remedy for unhappy marriages will be found
in the cessation, of the anxiety on the part of so many parents _to get
their daughters married off_. It is but natural that this constant
anxiety should make the daughter feel that she would like to lessen her
parents' dread, and cease being a trouble to them, especially when
there are younger sisters crowding fast upon her, and so she says
"Yes," even when the word almost chokes in her